Rhona Bitner

The first “battle” painting I saw was at the National Gallery in London when I was in school. Its force took my breath away. I sank onto the wooden bench facing the painting and sat there until someone came and dragged me away. The next was this one, Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano – the counterattack by Micheletto da Cotignola c. 1435-40 (?) at the Louvre which I visit often. Someone wise and witty once said that Uccello was the first cubist and he was right. The works are indeed geometric, in keeping with the trend of the time, and so “designed” that they feel modern, contemporary, typographic. The density of color (ok maybe some of it is soot) and the relationship not only of the design elements like circles, diagonals, straight lines and wild angles (and those glimmering golden medallions) … but also the relationship of emotion, gesture and movement within the jumble of forms. Uccello exaggerates the rules of the day, and creates his own language. Maybe that is why I look at these works so much… this spatial obsession, the care, intensity and over-the-top love for it…  as well as that frenzied black eyed gaze… never fails to draw me in, seduce me and let me drown in its foreshortened depths.  Or maybe it’s just the crazy hats.